The long version:During meditation, noticing impermanence is effortless, like seeing the sky is blue, no extra thinking necessary. But now and then, there's a sense of "zooming in". With the sky example, you don't see "blue" anymore and even feel surprised you thought the sky was anything at all. Nothing to describe, yet here it is anyway. It's most pronounced with walking meditation, like the walking is literally no longer happening, no impermanence, like slowing down a film until you see the individual frames and notice the pictures are not actually moving. But still there's the movie, the "whatever the hell this is". Step back and impermanence shows up again, the film is moving again.

I have not noticed this with dukkha or anatta.

I only ask because I know we are really good at misleading ourselves. I know of the primacy of impermanence, and to have an intuition that impermanence is no more the case than permanence seems like going astray. Is this nothing to worry about, and just to sit through like everything else?

Thank you.

Last edited by duckfiasco on Mon Apr 29, 2013 5:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

the sense of "impermanence nowhere" occurs because the mind is too tight and too limited. the same happens when you try to visualize something gigantic or something microscopic, it takes skill to do it and we each have a limit.we pay close to attention to what is arising and we get some sense of impermanence, then at some point we reach the limit of our skill. answer: develop more skill. what is at the base of momentariness is not impermanence nowhere

So then the answer is just to keep on truckin'? I thought it might be as much but am concerned about the equivalent of a GPS telling you to turn down a street and there you find a marsh instead of a pancake restaurant I still haven't found a teacher, so the risk of being misled feels very real. I have no qualms just saying, "that's nice dear, back to the breath" to this like any other experience, though.

Last edited by duckfiasco on Mon Apr 29, 2013 5:13 am, edited 2 times in total.

duckfiasco wrote:So then the answer is just to keep on truckin'? I thought it might be as much but am concerned about the equivalent of a GPS telling you to turn down a street and there you find a marsh instead of a pancake restaurant I still haven't found a teacher, so the risk of being misled feels very real. I have no qualms just saying, "that's nice dear, back to the breath" to this like any other experience, though.

well impermanence and the concentration required to notice it are really just the beginning. if you can actually manage to find a good teacher they will help you a lot. you can use your ideas of impermanence to judge who is or is not up to your standard. once you have enough concentration to be able to play continuous close attention without becoming distracted, then there are a million different things you can do

ground wrote:Both, impermanence and permanence are just fabrications resulting from being obsessed with the dependently arisen sense of "time".

This is more the feeling of the experience, not that impermanence is somehow elusive, but that it becomes relative and drops away, being for that moment as irrelevant as permanence. This only occurs when concentration has been established for a little while, which is rare enough in itself for me. It feels like a temporary "upgrade" to concentration before returning back to noticing impermanence. It's only ever lasted for a few seconds.

Just in lacking a teacher, I'm trying to avoid fixating on things and creating problems, like fixating on lights or visions. Though the advice to practice more is something I absolutely will embrace

Anatta in meditation = when you finally see that the thing you thought was perceiving impermanence is itself one of those impermanent appearances, just part of the movie..you can try to look at the movie watcher while she is watching, instead of just the movie and you will see eventually that the movie watcher actually reappears from moment to moment in a simultaneous relationship to the movie, what you thought was the viewer has no independence at all from the viewed - even when the viewer mistakenly thinks that the movie is real.

Dukkha is an easy one for me, life sucks,,personally it's the thing I notice most lol, just (usually) low level dissatisfaction, always looking for something solid and grounding and not finding such a thing. Also intimately connected to that watcher which is so hard to see is just part of the movie. So next time you sit and feel like crap about something, look at the watcher then too...she will look different than the watcher that was viewing the movie at a different point, because again they are not seperate from the movie, and don't have any permanent state..but they think they are a permanent state, so if you are identifying with the watcher, voila- impermanence is gone for a bit. Exactly what happens when we get extremely angry or something, the world attenuates down into a very narrow band linked to that state.

All personal subjective experience, carrying no authority whatsoever of course!